Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication system and a method of controlling the same.
Description of the Related Art
As actions for dealing with product troubles become more complicated, customers frequently directly inquire to a call center of a maker to get answers in order to deal with such troubles. Furthermore, execution of a maintenance service by remote operation, and transmitting/receiving of moving images and audio which provides guidance as to how to handle the trouble between an image forming apparatus and a call center in order to swiftly deal with such troubles is being considered (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-208974). Generally in such a remote maintenance service, an information processing apparatus of a call center which performs support and an image forming apparatus which is supported are inside respective firewalls. For this reason, installing a relay server that relays communication between both parties on the Internet so that the image forming apparatus and the information processing apparatus can perform communication is proposed (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2013-029922). By installing such a relay server, communication between apparatuses within firewalls becomes possible.
However, when the number of lines connecting such a relay server, image forming apparatuses and information processing apparatuses increases, communication traffic also increases. To deal with this, it is necessary to raise the performance of the relay server or increase the number of relay servers. However, since it is not realistic to increase the number of relay servers endlessly, giving priority to a connection with a relay server, and suppressing the number of relay servers to a predetermined number has been proposed. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H06-350723 recites providing a general reserved memory that registers reservation information of a television conference and a priority reserved memory that registers reservation information of a priority reservation, and a control apparatus controlling connections based on general reservations and priority reservations which are registered to each memory. However, according to the above described conventional technique it is assumed that a prioritized terminal for a conference is reserved in advance, and since a priority of a terminal for which a priority reservation has not been made cannot be changed in accordance with the situation, there is a problem in that there is a lack of flexibility.